Price: $7.30 as of 11/08/2009 19:55 EST
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780340979495
ISBN: 0340979496
Label: WINDBLOWN MEDIA
Manufacturer: WINDBLOWN MEDIA
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: January 01, 2008
Publisher: WINDBLOWN MEDIA
Studio: WINDBLOWN MEDIA
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Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I'm sorry, I am not anti-God or anything, but this thing was just so poorly written that I couldn't finish it. The story was fine in theory, but the writing was just bad. I guess if you are into sermons and things like that then it would be OK. This was just not interesting or well written.
Rating: -
The author makes apologies for not being the one with the experience, but merely reporting it. The man with the experience has two dilemmas: First, deep anger with his own father, Second, guilt about not noticing that his daughter is being abducted. As the man struggles with his anger and guilt, the author goes right into describing the drama of meeting the Blessed Trinity in ordinary human form, without stating the man hit his head and was knocked unconscious prior to the experience. I believe that the experience was a deep dream in which he forgives himself for his father-hatred and his daughter's disappearance. To soften the ordeal of his daughter and ease his guilt, he claims that Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are in the car with the child during the kidnapping and that the child feels safe and unafraid. The daughter ends up in a happy place in the afterlife where she plays with other abductees. I found this book to be untrue in its story line and particularly in the so-called experience with God and Jesus. The author should have started with the experience, and then weave it into the story and try to explain the phenomenon. Many people have experiences with the divine without being knocked unconscious.
Rating:  -
This book is great. It is so great that I purchase ten more to share with family and friends. The book is so great that I hope a movie is made on it. This is the kind of books we need today to share others. The bookd is so great that I would tell eerybody and anybody to read and think of the message from the book. It is a thinking book and may have someone believe in God again. Miguel.
Rating: -
This is a unique and unusual book and if you open your mind, you will be wonderfully blessed. It is an enlightening and moving story to help us all better understand the true heart of God and to help us want to get closer to Him. I believe this story is helping to heal much sadness and bitterness in our world. Thanks William Paul Young! May your story continue to bring Hope to many!
Rating: -
Because I have long since stopped jumping on any Christian bandwagon, I waited a year or so before reading "The Shack" by William Paul Young. It had been recommended by my daughter's Pastor who said it was a book about Grace and Forgiveness. That sounded safe enough. But I could tell it had really dug deeply into his soul. So, I bought copies and handed them around, maybe to get some feed back?? John commented on this, and often asked why I hadn't read it yet. Maybe I let myself get distracted by a gypsy time away from home, a disquieted restlessness of spirit that drove me to the brink of exhaustion, or just time spent as a hovering mother, and an ever solicitous grandmother. So much to learn, look at, try my hand at, and understand in this technology-driven matrix we live in.
I couldn't stop reading "The Shack" once I started, and have been rereading it since. Not that it's become like a bible textbook. Oh no. It's an outside-the-box book for an inquiring Christian like myself, who once devoured Philip Yancey's book, "The Jesus I Never Knew". I'm not devouring this one. It's too dense, and too simplistic. But it has uncovered old wounds once delivered by members of Christ's own Body, the Church. The whips were in the hands of performance-driven addicts in His Name, and the lashes were publicly shown to compound our shame and guilt, the dark fruit of living in the Old Testament.
Then, to further aid my understanding, I was given a copy of the author's testimony on CD. That will also take many hearings. He began by reassuring his audience that this story was only a metaphor. This Greek word means "to transfer", to carry. Writers use symbolic transference of meaning from one thing to represent another. (CS Lewis used the figure of Aslan to represent Jesus.) Suddenly it became clear to me that the real story behind the story was far more compelling, and it definitely filled in the blanks. The author needed to hide his pulsating pain under metaphorical wraps after he had stumbled out of his shack to be healed.
William Young was a church kid, an MK, and a PK. He was raised by dedicated parents on the Mission field in New Guinea, but that was also where he was unwittingly initiated into the sexual rituals of a primeval cannibalistic culture. These stone age people became his surrogate family, guardians and teachers, and he often overheard them talking about killing his parents. He didn't know he was a WASP, and thought he was black like them for many years. He had in fact, been raped, his childhood innocence ripped from him like Missy's torn dress, and he had to lead a double life, hidden beneath the slick veneer of a Christian superstar, for many years in the church world. His marriage survived, his kids thrived and he has been revived. Those can only be called miracles of God's grace, and underscore the powerful lessons of the book.
The Shack isn't a theology rewrite, but a cross-cultural testament for wounded Christians, of which I am one, and there are many more like me. The shack is a symbolic place where the author runs headlong into God, and is transformed from an angry, judgmental doubter into a loving, forgiving believer. The story line isn't important here, neither is the literary style. What is transferred to us from the metaphor are imaginative conversations with God, in three distinct Persons, and that is where the trouble begins. This is not a new teaching on how to understand the Trinity. That is too great a mystery for us to take on. Augustine has handed that one down for us in excellent form. But Young approaches God on a very personal, earthy level, which may seem disrespectful to many Christians. However this must all be translated back into the realm of the author's imagination, as it became for him, and for some of us, a denouement, and the catharsis of his struggle to "keep the faith".
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